Research Note

This research note examines the origins and changing meanings of the term perspective. It also introduces an unsigned archival essay discovered among the papers and books of Professor Kim Veltman in 2020.

The essay’s authorship and exact date remain uncertain. The name Ruby appears in the upper corner of each typewritten page, but this does not establish authorship. The document appears to date from the mid- or late twentieth century, possibly the 1960s or 1970s.

We publish the essay because it provides a substantial discussion of the historical relationship between perspectiva, optics and pictorial perspective. Before presenting it, the following sections summarise the principal origins and changing meanings of the term within the wider framework developed by the Perspective Research Centre.

Western Origins

The English word perspective derives from the Latin perspectiva. During the Middle Ages, perspectiva commonly denoted optics: the mathematical and physical study of vision, light, visual rays and image formation.

The term was associated with the Latin verb perspicere, which could carry meanings related to looking through, looking into, examining or seeing clearly. However, as the archival essay below explains, the prefix per- did not necessarily determine the original technical meaning of perspectiva.

Albrecht Dürer later connected perspectiva with the German word Durchsehung, meaning “seeing through” or “a view through something”. This interpretation is particularly appropriate to pictorial perspective, which often involves looking through a window, veil, picture plane or geometrical construction.

The term therefore developed two closely related but distinct associations: the direct visual and optical processes through which something is seen, and the graphical methods through which spatial appearances are constructed or represented.

Historical Development of the Term

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Latin translators sought an appropriate equivalent for the Greek term optikē, meaning optics or the science of vision. Several terms were used, including de aspectibus, speculativa, inspectiva and perspectiva.

Perspectiva gradually became the dominant term through its adoption by influential medieval writers on optics, including Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Pecham and Witelo. In their writings, it referred principally to the science of vision rather than to a method of drawing.

During the Renaissance, the Italian form prospettiva acquired a more specifically artistic meaning. Lorenzo Ghiberti appears to have been among the earliest writers to use the word in connection with graphical representation. By the 1480s, Antonio di Tuccio Manetti could describe Filippo Brunelleschi’s achievement as what painters then called prospettiva.

The word consequently shifted from its medieval association with optics towards the post-medieval meaning described by Dürer: the construction of a view through a picture plane. It did not lose its earlier visual and optical meanings, however, and the different senses of the term have continued to overlap.

Changing Meanings of Perspective

Perspective now has many meanings. It may refer to direct visual appearance, the science of sight, an optical or geometrical process, a graphical method, an instrument, a view, an image, a projection, a simulation or a conceptual standpoint.

In its narrow artistic sense, perspective concerns methods for representing spatial extension, depth, relative size and apparent position. In its broader sense, it concerns how spatial reality is viewed, imaged, measured, modelled, represented, projected, simulated and understood.

The Dictionary of Perspective identifies approximately 1,200 types and forms of perspective. The PRC’s framework distinguishes their different visual, optical, geometrical, technical and symbolic functions rather than treating every use of the word as though it described the same process.

Its principal categories include Natural, Mathematical, Graphical, Instrument, Simulated and Forced, and New Media Perspective. These categories frequently overlap and may form chains linking physical space, light, vision, image formation, graphical construction, instruments, digital processing, projection and human interpretation.

Etymological Analysis

The study of perspective terminology across languages must distinguish between cognates, loanwords, doublets and translations.

Cognates are words in different languages inherited from a common linguistic ancestor. Loanwords are adopted from one language into another. Doublets are different words within the same language that derive from a common source, while translations are words or phrases selected as approximate semantic equivalents.

A translated term may emphasise viewpoint, sight, appearance, projection, depth, representation or conceptual position without reproducing every meaning carried by the English word perspective. Comparative research across Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages therefore requires careful linguistic and historical verification.

The following tables present a preliminary selection of terms currently recorded by the PRC. They should be understood as provisional mappings rather than as a completed etymological analysis.

Indo-European Languages

Latin belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, which also includes the Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian and Greek branches.

The Latin or Roman alphabet developed from the writing system used by the ancient Romans and, with later additions and adaptations, is now used for English and many other European languages.

Not all European languages are Indo-European. Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian and Sámi belong to the Uralic family; Maltese is a Semitic language; and Basque is generally regarded as a language isolate.

Language	Term
Czech	Perspektivni
Danish	Perspektiv
Dutch	Perspektive
English	Perspective
French	La Perspective
Frisian	perspektyf
German	Perspektive
Greek	προοπτική
Hindi	पिरप्रेक्ष्य
Icelandic	sjónarhorn
Italian	prospettiva
Kurdish	nerrane
Norwegian	perspektiv
Persian	چشم انداز
Polish	Perspektywiczny
Portuguese	Perspectiva
Romanian	perspectivă
Russian	перспектива
Sanskrit	दृशीक
Spanish	Perspectiva
Swedish	Perspektiv

Table 1: Preliminary mapping of the term “perspective” across selected Indo-European languages

This preliminary list will be expanded as the research develops. Further work is required to determine whether each term is a cognate, loanword, translation or approximate semantic equivalent, and to identify differences in meaning and cultural emphasis.

Non-Indo-European Languages

Non-Indo-European languages comprise numerous unrelated language families and possess considerable linguistic and cultural diversity.

The terms below represent preliminary equivalents currently recorded by the PRC. They do not necessarily reproduce every visual, optical, graphical or conceptual meaning associated with the English word perspective.

Language	Term
Arabic	إنطباع
Chinese	看法 — Kànfǎ
Hebrew	פרספקטיןוה
Japanese	視点

Table 2: Preliminary mapping of the term “perspective” across selected non-Indo-European languages

This list will also be expanded and refined as further linguistic and historical research is completed.

Unsigned Archival Essay on the History of the Term “Perspective”

Editorial Note

The following unsigned essay was discovered among the papers and books preserved in the Kim Veltman Archive in 2020. Its authorship and exact date have not been confirmed. The name Ruby appears in the upper corner of each page, although it is not known whether this identifies the author, typist, owner or recipient of the document.

The essay presents a detailed historical argument concerning the development of the Latin term perspectiva, its medieval use as a designation for optics, and its later adoption by Renaissance artists to describe graphical representation.

The transcription is presented as an archival research document and has not yet undergone full scholarly verification. Some typographical, bibliographical or transcription errors may remain. Readers wishing to cite particular claims or references should consult the original works listed in the bibliography.

History of the Term “Perspective”

Although perspectiva is indeed a direct translation of οπτική – the Greek “optics” – it is not a literal one, there being nothing in οπτική corresponding to the per of perspectiva, a prefix originally meaning “through.”

Panofsky’s interpretation evidently depended on his belief that Boethius coined the term, for to Boethius (480-525) and others in the early centuries of the Christian era perspicere did have the meaning of “seeing clearly” – only, however, in the figurative sense of “understanding.” The passage in Early Netherlandish Painting, is undocumented, but many years earlier, in the ’20’s, in “Die Perspektive als ‘Symbolische Form,'” Panofsky cited what he thought was Boethius’s translation of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. At the time he said only that the term “seems originally not to have had so precise (‘pragnant’) a meaning” as Durer gave it.

He was mistaken in thinking the translation to be by Boethius. As Minio-Paluello was to show in 1968, the attribution is an error dating back to the Renaissance, the translation in fact having been made by James “the Greek” of Venice, probably between 1125 and 1150. Panofsky was, I think, mistaken also in his second reading of the medieval “perspectiva.” Not only is it unlikely that a literal use of a term would be derived from a figurative one, but not once did medieval writers on optics, concerned, like those of other times, with flawed and obscured as well as clear vision, associate the term with “seeing clearly” rather than vision in general.

Did the pre-fifteenth-century perspectiva, then, refer to perspicere in the sense of “seeing through”? Considering the content of medieval optical works, one might think so. In the Latin West, beginning with Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), the first to write an original work in optics-as distinguished from a commentary, theories of vision were not simply mathematical, but, under the influence first of Aristotle and Avicenna and very shortly of Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham, c. 965-1039), physical as well.

Although the theories differed in some respects, they all entailed the idea of a transparent corporeal medium between the object seen and the viewer, a medium generally called either diaphanum, a transliteration of Aristotle’s word for “transparency,” or perspicuum, a Latin equivalent, unmistakably derived from perspicere in the sense of “seeing through,” In the purely mathematical theories of Euclid and of the ninth century Alkindi, there is nothing whatever about transparency, and in Ptolemy’s Optics one finds only the adjective perspectabilis, used once, and then not of the medium but of the eye.

In contrast, in Grosseteste’s brief De Iride (On the Rainbow) and even briefer De Colore (On Color), both written around 1234-6 1235, diaphanum is used twenty-five times, perspicuum eleven. The optical works of Roger Bacon (ca.1210-ca.1292), John Pecham (ca.1240-1292), and Witelo (born ca.1220) drew heavily on Alhazen’s Kitab al-Manazir, where terms for “transparency” and “transparent” occur close to four hundred times. Although in the Latin translation one finds only diaphanum and diaphanus, Bacon and Pecham, like Grosseteste, used the Latin and the transliterated Greek interchangeably.

Yet, one does not find the writers on optics linking perspectiva with perspicere in the sense of “seeing through” any more than in that of “seeing clearly.” One might expect to find the association at least in definitions of perspectiva; but in Grosseteste’s, to my knowledge the only one in the thirteenth century except for a partial echo in Pecham, there is no reference to the transparent medium. “Perspective,” he says:

“is the science based on visual shapes, and subordinate to this is the science-based on shapes which radiant lines and surfaces bound, whether that radiation is from the sun, or the stars, or some other radiant body.”
Grosseteste (1234-6)

In sum, to thirteenth-century writers on optics the per of perspectiva meant neither “clearly” nor “through.” What, then, accounts for it?

When one goes back to twelfth-century translations of the Prior Analytics one discovers that perspectiva was but one of three words coined in the search for a satisfactory rendering, of οπτική. In his translation of the work from the Arabic, Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187) was content with a phrase, scientia aspectuum or de aspectibus, aspectus being a classical noun derived from aspicere, “to look at,” and meaning “sight” or “appearance.” The phrase was also Gundisalvi’s (fl. 1140) designation for optics when he introduced the discipline into the Western classification of the sciences.

Evidently, however, James of Venice was seeking – groping for – a single word to match the Greek. In rendering the οπτική’s of the Posterior Analytics, he uses perspectiva only twice. Despite saying in the case of the first use, οπτική, id est perspectiva,” for the other four he uses speculativa, coined from speculor, which meant “to spy out,” “watch for,” or “observe.” As to his choice for the single οπτική(os) (worker in optics), the manuscripts vary, some reading perspectivus, others speculativus. Only in William of Morbeke’s version of the work, probably a revision of James’s, in the second half of the thirteenth century, does one find perspectiva used consistently, together with perspectivus.

Not only did James vacillate; between 1125 and 1160 someone known only as Johannes (John), revising James’s translation, replaced both perspectiva and speculativa with inspectiva, which he coined from inspicere, “to look into,” “examine,” or “inspect.” Why James chose perspectiva and speculativa and John jettisoned both one cannot say. However, James’s wavering and John’s rejection of perspectiva make it evident that the per had as little significance when the term was coined as it had in the thirteenth century.

How, then, did it happen that in the 1260’s perspectiva, displacing: the other terms, became the usual designation for optics? The odds would seem against it.

To be sure, inspectiva clearly had little chance, there being hundreds of surviving manuscripts of James’s translation and only two of John’s revision; and speculativa one could expect to give way in the minds of James’s readers to his emphatic “οπτική id est perspectiva.” De aspectibus, however, would seem another matter. True, there are only nine surviving manuscripts of Gerard’s translation; but not only was de aspectibus also Gundisalvi’s rendering of οπτική but the phrase was widely used in the thirteenth century for the Greek and Arabic works on which the West drew – always for Al-kindi’s and sometimes for Tideus’s, both of which Gerard translated, sometimes for Euclid’s, which he may have translated, also for Ptolemy’s, translated by Eugene of Sicily, and more often than not for Alhazen’s.

The explanation for the victory of perspectiva is to be found in its adoption by two of the most influential thirteenth-century writers on optics, Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, Grosseteste taking: the term from James and Bacon in turn from Grosseteste, indirectly and directly. Although in his commentary on the Posterior Analytics Grosseteste follows James in using both speculativa and perspectiva, in the De Iride and the De Colore he uses only perspectiva, along with perspectivus and its plural perspectivi.

Bartholomaeus Anglicus (fl. ca. 1250) borrowed perspectiva from him, using it three times in his popular encyclopedia, the De Propretatibus rerum – not, however, for the science, but only for Alhazen’s Kitab al-Manazir. Evidently not knowing the name of the author, he refers either to “the author of the Perspectiva” or simply to “the Perspectiva.” Albertus Magnus, writing in the ’40’s and ’50’s, also drawing on Grosseteste, and probably on Bartholomaeus, too, speaks of Alhazen once as “the author of the Perspectiva” although he knew his name, calls Algazel’s and Euclid’s optical works also “Perspectiva,” writes repeatedly of perspectivi and once of geometrias perspectivas (optical geometries), and calls optics scientia perspectivorum” as well as Scientia de aspectibus. However, although he may have contributed to Bacon’s use of perspectiva, his direct influence on the future of optics and the optical vocabulary was relatively slight.

In his commentary on Aristotle’s De Sensu et sensibile, probably written during his Paris stay in the 1240’s, and in his De Multiplicatione specierum, of the late ’50’s or early ’60’s, a work dealing with the general principles of physical action, Bacon uses perspectiva only as Bartholomaeus does.

At the time of the commentary, in the optical portions of which he draws almost exclusively on Alhazen, he was in all likelihood familiar with the De proprietatibus rerum but not yet with Grosseteste’s writings. He calls the Kitab al-Manazir “Perspectiva,” without naming Alhazen, more than forty times, Although he almost certainly knew the De Iride by the time he wrote the De Multiplicatione, he still uses perspectiva only for Alhazen’s treatise, now, though, naming him. However, drawing here for the first time on the works of Euclid, Ptolemy, Tideus, and Alkindi, he calls Alhazen’s, along with theirs, “De Aspectibus” most of the time and refers to writers on optics collectively as “auctores; de aspectibus or aspectuum.)

In the Perspectiva of ca. 1263, which deals solely with optics and is, accordingly, closely related in subject to the opening sections of the De Iride, the auctores become auctores perspectivae, or else perspectivi; and the science, not clearly referred to as such in the De Multiplicatione, is either perspectiva or scientia perspectivae. Apart from use for the works of Alkindi and Tidaus, de aspectibus occurs only twice, both times in a triple phrase implicitly equating it with perspectiva and optica.

Although Grosseteste’s influence would seem, possibly along with that of Albertus Magnus, a factor in the change, one suspects that also accountable is the emergence in Bacon’s thought of Alhazen, with whom he had long distinctively associated the term, as the preeminent authority in optics. Not only does he express his admiration for Alhazen’s work in the De Multiplicatione specierum, but in the Perspectiva he bases his own closely on it. There the distinctive association persists. Although he also calls Ptolemy’s treatise, which in his view ran Alhazen’s a close second, “Perspectiva” rather than “Optica” most of the time, Alhazen’s he calls that consistently, except in one of the tripling phrases; and several times he refers to Alhazen, as in the early commentary, simply as “auctor Perspectivae.

John Pecham followed suit in his work that was to be known in the fourteenth century as the Perspectiva communis, calling the science “perspectiva” and speaking of Alhazen’s work simply as “the Perspectiva” and of Alhazen as “auctor Perspectivae” or even simply as “auctor;” and Witelo wrote in the dedication of his widely used treatise on optics that those who preceded him in the science were called “Perspectivi.” Since, to cite David Lindberg, Bacon, together with Pecham and Witelo, “initiated a Western optical tradition that faithfully transmitted the essence of Alhazen’s achievement in optics to Kepler and his seventeenth-century contemporaries,” it was appropriate that the term long associated especially with Alhazen should become the designation for optics for the next several centuries.

If, however, the essence of Alhazen’s achievement was carried into the seventeenth century, the term itself was not. In 1572, the year after Kepler was born, Friedrich Risner, publishing the Latin translation of the Kitab al-Manazir, called it, perhaps because the term had been taken over by artists, perhaps because of the Renaissance revival of Greek in the West, Opticae thesaurus (Treasury of Optics). Optics was again “optics.” In the meanwhile, Renaissance artists had encountered perspectiva in works by Bacon, Pecham, Witelo and others.

So far as I have discovered, Ghiberti, whose “Third Commentary” draws heavily on medieval optical works, was the first to use the term in the artistic sense. There is no perspectiva in Alberti’s description, in his De Pictura of 1435, of the principle of linear perspective in terms of a cross-section through the visual pyramid serving “as an open window through which the subject Painted is seen.” He called optical theorists either “mathematicians” or “philosophers” and asked that the painter have “above all a good knowledge of geometry”.

Around 1458, writing of Brunelleschi, Giovanni Rucellai still used geometra. The first to associate “perspective” directly with Brunelleschi would seem to have been Filarete, in the early ’60’s. In the mean while, however, Ghiberti not only asked that the painter know perspective as well as geometry, but used prospettiva of graphic representation.

Both the phrasing of the passage in which the use occurs and the fact that Ghiberti used prospettiva, together with prospettivi of optics and optical theorists over a score of times in the “Commentaries” and only once for artistic representation, suggest that the moment of transition lay with him. “Apelles,” he writes:

“having gone to the house of Protogenes in Rhodes and finding a panel prepared and wishing to show the nobility of the art of painting and how excellent he was in it, seized a brush and finished it with the perspective belonging to the art of painting (compuose una conclusione in prospettiva appartenente all’arte della pictura).”
Lorenzo Ghiberti – excerpt from his third commentary (1447-1455)

Whatever the precise steps in the establishment of the use, by the ’80’s Antonio di Tuccio Manetti could write that Brunelleschi had developed “che dipintorii oggi dicono prospettiva (what painters today call ‘perspective‘).”

Thus, construing literally a prefix that was arbitrary and meaningless when perspectiva was coined, the artists of the Renaissance indeed found a term describing excellently and briefly their novel method of graphic representation.